We have not touched the stars,
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back
to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.
We are all going forward. None of us are going back.— Excerpts from “Snow and Dirty Rain” by Richard Siken
I’m sitting in the sunlight in a tiny town in Portugal with someone who is terrible at sitting still.
We are (attempting) to read our books while stretched out in front of the Mondego river. It’s been a day of driving with the top down singing loudly to Travis Scott and my hair is tangled, scented with sea. There’s this fountain that’s rising and falling in all directions almost comically, teasing us against the backdrop of the sun stubbornly continuing to set in one direction against the mountains.
“How do Europeans do absolutely nothing all day?” he asks me when looking up from his book.
I laugh and shake my head at my you’re-such-a-typical-New-Yorker friend. “Because maybe they are the ones that really know how to live.”
In New York City, I’m always writing things feverishly while walking up subway steps. There’s always such urgency, never enough time to sit still and do nothing. I think to myself: god, I could trip and fall and die. And there’s that part of me that thinks: writing is one of those few things that would make me fold my hands in my lap in the afterlife and say, “Well. Good thing it was worth it.”
A few months ago my friend came to visit, all memories and lines and bait — like a good fisherman. I talked like he was going to move back here, and he said quietly, “Man, New York City takes so much effort though. You seem like you love it. Is it really worth it?”
The good things are worth the effort. This past year, we’ve been challenged to put our hearts, minds, bodies, relationships — everything — on the line for the kind of world we’ve told ourselves we believe in. But let’s remember: there are a lot of people who’ve been fighting these fights most of their lives, not just this year. So many of my friends have faltered this year at the absurdity of fighting for what we believe in. Or what we love. We’d all like to lose ourselves in something big, gigantic; but more unfortunately, it seems, something we are absolutely certain we can win at.
We are here now. Even if the odds are (obviously) that we can’t win every time, struggling in our convictions for what is good and right seems to be a worthy cause.
I could go on about 2016, but I think everyone else pretty much has the negative side covered. Every blog post and tweet sums it up: “2016 was shit. Good riddance.” I thought about the posts I could write: summarizing the books I read, new jobs, new loves, my travels, how it felt to meet my goal of writing in my Day One journal every day, the number of steps I’ve taken since getting a Fitbit; while they are all things I’d like to expand upon, nothing seemed to fit for the final entry of the year. I thought about writing nothing at all. Or just quoting from the greats. There are endless relevant quotes from James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Hannah Arendt, Margaret Mead, W.E.B. Dubois, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Maya Angelou, Junot Díaz, and on and on.
I don’t think I’m the only person who has been paralyzed about what to write (or what not to write) — what if people get angry with me because I leave out important issues? What if people get angry with me when I do write about important issues? Is it worse to be silent than to write incompletely? Is it frivolous to write about love and hope in a time of terror and despair? Is it ok to quote poetry instead of more politically-relevant works? (Many of the same questions I asked myself last year.) It took a lot of courage to act on the thought I had: What any of us writes will always be incomplete. Write anyway.
